Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a web service that provides resizable computing capacity within the cloud. It is a part of Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allows users to rent virtual machines (VMs) on which to run their own applications. EC2 instances can be easily created and configured to run specific operating systems and applications. Users can also configure the number of CPU, memory, and storage resources for each instance. EC2 is a highly scalable and flexible service that can be used for a wide range of applications, including web and application servers, databases, and big data processing.
AWS Cloud EC2 Instance Types
Amazon EC2 offers a variety of instance types optimized to fit different use cases. These instance types differ in the number of CPU, memory, storage, and networking resources they provide. Some of the main EC2 instance types include:
General Purpose
These instances are suitable for a wide range of workloads and are a good starting point for many applications. They include the t2, m5, and m5a instances.
Compute Optimized: These instances are optimized for compute-intensive workloads, such as batch processing, distributed analytics, and high-performance computing (HPC). They include the c5 and c5n instances.
Memory Optimized
These instances are optimized for memory-intensive workloads, such as real-time big data processing, in-memory databases, and high-performance computing. They include the r5, r5a, and x1e instances.
Storage Optimized
These instances are optimized for storage-intensive workloads, such as NoSQL databases, data warehousing, and log processing. They include the d2, i3, and h1 instances.
GPU instances
These instances are optimized for machine learning, high-performance computing (HPC), gaming, and other GPU-intensive workloads. They include P3, G3, G4 instances.
ARM instances
These instances are based on ARM-based processors and are optimized for scale-out and Arm-based workloads that are supported by the Arm instruction set.
Users can also choose from different instance sizes within each instance type, depending on their specific resource requirements.
It’s also worth noting that AWS also offers “Spot instances” and “Dedicated instances” which offer additional flexibility and cost savings respectively.